Excerpts
from:
______________
SLOSS
FURNACES
AND
THE RISE OF
THE
BIRMINGHAM
DISTRICT
An
Industrial Epic
________________________
W.
DAVID LEWIS
The
University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa
and London
Ed., This is an extraordinarily
thorough treatise on the Alabama iron industry -
highly annotated and with an extensive bibliography.
Reproduced here are sections dealing with the involvement
of the Northern interests – notably James
Thomas, Giles Edwards
and the David Thomas
family.
History
of American Science and Technology Series
General
Editor, LESTER D. STEPHENS\
Copyright
~ 1994 The University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, Alabama 3S487-o380 All
rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
The
paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z3g.48-lg84.
Library
of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lewis,
W. David (Walter David), 1931
Sloss
Furnaces and the rise of the Birmingham district: an industrial epic / W David
Lewis.
p.
cm.—(History of American science and technology series)
Includes
bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
o-8173-o7o8-7 (alk. paper) '. Sloss Furnace Company—History. 2. Iron
industry and trade —Alabama—Birmingham—HistorY 3. Iron
foundries—Alabama —Birmingham—History. 4.
Iron-founding—Alabama—Birmingham —HistorY 5.
Iron—MetallurgY 6. Birmingham (Ala.)—Industries —HistorY 7.
Birmingham (Ala.)—Economic conditions. 8. Birminghar (Ala.)—Social
conditions. 9. Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark—HistorY 1.
Title. 11. Series. HDg 5 1 9. S68L4g 1 994 338.7'672Z,og76l78l—dc20
British
Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available
93-48178
Excerpt
from P. 10
Pig iron was a form of
cast iron, the waste material previously shunned by ironworkers. It had a high
carbon content, resulting from protracted exposure to burning charcoal, making
it brittle and hence unsuitable for implements that had to sustain rough use.
This drawback, however, could be removed by reheating and hammering the metal
at a separate installation known as a finery, producing a tough, fibrous
product that was essentially the same as wrought iron and was therefore called
by the same name. To secure greater output, ironworkers had substituted an
elaborate two-stage method for the earlier bloomery process; the dramatically enhanced
productivity per unit of labor more than made up for the added expense caused
by the scale and complexity of the equipment needed, yielding what would later
be called economies of scale.
By the time the blast
furnace had been developed, moreover, it was not necessary to refine all the
pig iron that could be made in such an installation, because cast iron was no
longer a waste product. Gunpowder had spread from Asia to Europe, resulting in
the development of artillery. Crude cannons were made at first of wrought iron;
better ones were then made of bronze or brass; still later, cast-iron cannons
became popular because they were less expensive. Cannonballs, earlier made of
stone, were now made of molded cast iron. What had once been an unwanted
material had now become a military necessity.19
Cast iron was also
used for fire backs, stove plates, andirons, and hollowware. The high carbon
content that made unrefined pig iron unsuitable for tools and implements was no
drawback in these products; on the contrary, it actually enhanced them, because
cast iron is excellent for radiating heat. Demand for cast iron therefore
remained brisk until the late twentieth century. This produced a new type of
installation that ultimately created substantial markets for Sloss Furnaces.
For centuries, cast-iron products were molded at the mouth of a blast furnace.
It became more efficient, however, to take pig iron to a separate facility,
known as a foundry, where it was remelted in a new type of furnace, known as a
cupola. The foundry trade became a key component of the iron industry.20
For a time, the firm that owned Sloss Furnaces became the world's largest maker
of foundry pig iron, and Alabama was the chief center of the American foundry
trade.
19. Carlo M. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires:
Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion 1400-1700
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), passim; William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of
Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (reprint, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1982), 81-89, 99-101, 166-69.
20. On the rise of foundries, see Bruce L.
Simpson, History of the Metal-Casting Industry, zd ed. (Des Plaines, 111.:
American Foundrymen's Society, 1948), passim.
Excerpt
from P. 20
An unusually
innovative Alabama ironworks was Shelby Furnace, which went into blast near
Columbiana between 1846 and 1849. It was built by Horace Ware, a native of
Massachusetts who came south with his parents, settling in North Carolina
before coming to Alabama. Learning ironmaking from his father, Ware produced
charcoal iron for markets as far away as Sheffield, England, again showing the
importance of the export trade. Closer to home, however, were such customers as
Pratt's cotton gin factory, indicating that the modest degree of manufacturing
underway in the state by the late 1845 was having a favorable impact that may
help explain Ware's interest in using relatively new techniques. An irascible
but highly ingenious person, Ware was Alabama's most creative early ironmaster;
he used a steamboat engine instead of a
waterwheel for blowing power and experimented with a heated air blast in
1855. Although it was already common in the North, this was the first time that
this method had been tried in Alabama. In 1858, Ware also began building
Alabama's first rolling mill, which started making merchant bar iron in 1860.
His installation, the most progressive in the state, also included a cupola,
foundry, and machine shop. 37
37. Robert H.
McKenzie, "Horace Ware: Alabama Iron Pioneer," AR 26 (July 1973):
57-63' Richard D. Wallace, "A History of the Shelby Iron Company,
1865-1872" (master's thesis, University of Alabama, 1953), 4-8; Woodham W.
Cauley, "A Study of the Accounting Records of the Sheby Iron Company"
(master's thesis, University of Alabama, 1949), passim; James F Doster,
"The Shelby Iron Works Collection in the University of Alabama
Library," BBHS 26 (December 1952), 214-17; Bergstresser, Sr., "Brief
History of Birmingham District," 2425, including a photograph of the
machine shop. On Cane Creek Furnace and its operations, see also J. D. B.
DeBow, The Industrial Resources . . . of the Southern and Western States (New
Orleans: DeBow's Review, 1853),1:59.
Excerpt
from Pp. 35 - 36
Because it ultimately
became the first installation in Alabama to smelt iron with coke, one of the
Jefferson County stacks built during the war was particularly significant.
Later known as Oxmoor Furnace, it was constructed in 1863 at Grace's Gap by the
Red Mountain Iron and Coal Company, in which both Daniel Pratt and such Broad
River associates as Frank Gilmer were active. Erected by Moses Stroup, the
modestly proportioned stack was only thirty-two feet high and could not produce
more than five or six tons of iron per day from the red hematite with which it
was charged.
Jefferson County's
other Civil War blast furnace was built at Irondale by Wallace S. McElwain, a
native of Massachusetts who had moved to Mississippi in 1859. Making a cupola
from the shell of a locomotive boiler that he fished from the Tallahatchie
River, he helped establish a foundry at Holly Springs, Mississippi, not far
from the Tennessee line. Before the war, it shipped ornamental iron to such
places as the French Quarter of New Orleans; after 1861, it was enlarged and
became the first installation to make small arms for the Confederacy under
contract. Facing its capture by Union forces late in 1862, McElwain took its
equipment to Jefferson County and built a furnace in Shades Valley There, in
1864, he made a brief but encouraging experiment using coke for smelting. This
fuel had been virtually unknown in Alabama before the war. 75
Confederate
authorities also promoted the expansion of the Alabama coal industry. Mines
were opened in St. Clair County, but boats could reach downstate areas only
"when the rivers were swollen, and sometimes would wait for months for
enough water to float them over the shoals." Because of such problems,
coal commanded prices in Montgomery ranging as high as $125 per ton. The Alabama
Coal Mining Company sold much of its output to the Shelby works at Columbiana,
but shipments were often held up for lack of rail cars, and skilled workers
were in short supply. Coal mines that would figure importantly in the early
history of Birmingham were also opened at another Shelby County site, Helena,
in 1863.76
Much of the coal and
iron that was produced in Alabama during the war years went to a large naval
yard, arsenal, and ordnance works at Selma. That city was chosen for this
important complex because of its location on the Alabama and Tennessee Rivers
Railroad, its water connections with various places via the Alabama River, and
its remoteness from the front lines. Skilled workers were recruited from all
over the Confederacy, and Selma became a hive of industry, famed in later years
for the construction and arming of the Tennessee and for production of the
Confederacy's famous rifled Brooke guns, which were originally developed at the
Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond. In the absence of rail links to most parts of
the state, pig iron often had to be brought to Selma by wagons or river boats.77
75. Armes, Coal and
Iron, ¥6~-67; Marilyn Davis Barefield, A
History of Mountain Brook, Alabama & Incidentally of Shades Valley
(Birmingham: Bimmingham Publishing Company, 1989), 21-28; Eavenson, American
Coal Industry, 296; Warren, Practical
Dreamer, 100-101; Woodward, Alabama
Blast Furnaces, 58, 82-84, 106-8 According to Eavenson, the first known
case of coke manufacture in Alabama took place in Tuscaloosa County in 1854
76. Eavenson, American
Coal Industry' 296-98
77. The account of the
Selma complex given here and in the following paragraphs is based on Armes, Coal and Iron, 134-38; Barefield, History of Mountain Brook, 21-28;
Victor S. Clark, History of Manufactures
in the United States (New York: McGraw Hill, 1929), 24-47; Charles S.
Davis, Colin J McRae: Confederate
Financial Agent (Tuscaloosa, Ala.: Confederate Publishing Company, 1961),
13-35; Fitts, Selma, 49-54; Walter M.
Jackson, The Story of Selma
(Birmingham: Bimingham Printing Co., 1954), 201-7, 213; Edwin T. Layton,
"Colin J. McRae and the Selma Arsenal, " AR 19 (April 1966) 125-36;
Walter W. Stephen, "The Brooke Guns from Selma," AHQ 20 (Fall 1958)
462-75; Richard J. Stockham, "Alabama Iron for the Confederacy: The Selma
Works," AR 21 (July 1968) 13-72; Sol H. Tepper, "Torpedoes? Damn!" Ordeal at Selma Cun Foundry and the Battle
of Mobile Bay (Selma, Ala.: Selma Printing Co., 1979); and Frank E.
Vandiver, Ploughshares into Swords Josiah
Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952),
170-71. On concurrent developments
at Tredegar, see Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker
to the Confederacy: Joseph R Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966),108-290
Excerpt
from P. 37
Alabama's wartime
industrialization terminated abruptly in March and April 1865, when 14,000
Northern troops under Gen. James H. Wilson swept through the state in what one
historian has aptly called a "Yankee Blitzkrieg," systematically
destroying or damaging every ironworks they could find. Among others, both
Jefferson County stacks, the Tannehill installation, and the Bibb, Oxford, and
Shelby furnaces were put out of commission. After defeating Confederate general
Nathan Bedford Forrest's forces on April 2, the invaders captured Selma,
leveling what remained of the arsenal and naval foundry. Before abandoning the
city, the defenders dumped much of its industrial equipment into the Alabama
River to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. Tuscaloosa suffered a
similar fate as Union forces under Gen. John T. Croxton burned most of the
buildings at the University of Alabama. 79
By the time Wilson's
raid was over, the fire-blackened ruins of foundries and furnaces were all that
remained of Alabama's already limited capacity to produce ferrous metals.
Still, the war had helped demonstrate the state's industrial potential. Within
a few decades, Jones Valley would be transformed, and an aggressive young city
would stand where nothing but "sagebrush, woodland, and cotton
fields" had previously existed.80 This change required a furious struggle
between carpetbaggers, scalawags, and members of the Broad River group. In the
end, planter-dominated forces, preaching white supremacy and bent on carrying
out Milner's mandate to build an industrial metropolis manned by cheap, servile
black labor, would triumph. Jacksonian Democrats would no longer control the
state government, and ex-Whigs with strong ties to railroads and other
corporations would be ascendant. Amid the strife for which the Reconstruction
Era became proverbial, the South's greatest center of heavy industry was soon
to be born.
79. James P Jones,
Yankee Blitzkrieg: Wilson's Raid through
Alabama and Georgia (Athens University of Georgia Press, 1976), passim .
See also Armes, Coal and Iron, 181,
189-94; Barefield, History of Mountain
Brook, 29-30; Bennett, Old Tannehill,
55-76; Fitts, Selma, 54-61; and
Woodward, Alabama Blast Furnaces, 48,
84, 98, 105, 126, 139 On Croxton's Tuscaloosa raid, see Hubbs, Tuscaloosa, 43-45, and Norrell, A Promising Field, 30-32
80. Malcolm C.
McMillan, Yesterday's Birmingham (Miami,
Fla.: E. A Seemann Publishing Co, 1975), 17
Excerpt
from P. 41
Industry grew at a
snail's pace in Alabama during the fifteen years after 1865. In Jefferson
County, Irondale furnace was returned to blast in 1866 by Wallace McElwain,
with help from investors in Cincinnati. Raising the height of the stack to
forty-six feet, he used a hot-air blast and a steam-powered blowing engine but
gave up in the mid-l870s after seven years of heartache. Later, the
installation was dismantled. Bibb Furnace, now known as the Briarfield Iron
Works, was returned to life in 1866 by Josiah Gorgas, but his efforts were
ultimately fruitless. He had a hard time recruiting workers and was constantly
short of cash. Chronic squabbling with the owners of the Alabama and Tennessee
Rivers Railroad weighed him down; eventually, bitter and disillusioned, he
decided to sell out. Taking a post as headmaster of the preparatory school at
Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1869, he later became president of the University of
Alabama. The Briarfield Works stayed in operation under new owners, but were
shut down by the depression that began in 1873 and remained dormant for nearly
a decade. Another installation that had escaped wartime destruction due to its
remote location, Hale and Murdock Furnace in Lamar County, was temporarily
active after the war but could not overcome the handicap of being twenty-five
miles from the nearest railhead. It shut down in 1870.7
7. Barefield, History of Mountain Brook, 30-31; Clark,
History of Manufactures, 2:68-69;
Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Bibb County
Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818-1918 (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1984), 162-64; William B. Hesseltine, Confederate Leaders in the New South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1950), 67; Frank E. Vandiver, "Josiah Gorgas and the
Briarfield Iron Works," AR 3 (January 1950): 5-21; Woodward, Alabama Blast Fumaces, 48, 74, 85-86.
Excerpt
from P. 42
Alabama's poor showing
was not measurable merely numerically. Its blast furnaces, like those of other
southern states, were obsolete. Every ounce of Alabama's minuscule production
in 1875 came from furnaces that still used charcoal. Above the Mason-Dixon
Line, conditions were much different. Before the war, furnaces in northeastern
Pennsylvania had begun smelting iron with anthracite, named after anthrax, a
Greek word for coal. This mineral substance was sometimes called "stone
coal" due to its glossy finish and hard texture. Lacking hydrogen, it
burned with a virtual absence of flame. A hot-blast technique imported from
Great Britain, beginning in1839, made its utilization possible after early
efforts to smelt iron with anthracite had failed. By 1861, more than 100
furnaces, mostly in eastern Pennsylvania, were using this fuel, which contained
more latent heat than charcoal and was also cheaper, selling for prices as low
as $3 per ton in the early 1850s. Anthracite was superior to charcoal in its
ability to sustain a greater weight of ore without crumbling; furnaces that
used it could therefore be taller than charcoal-burning stacks, resulting in
greater efficiency and lower costs. 11
As Alfred D. Chandler
has pointed out, the use of anthracite led to the rapid development of
coal-based industries in the United States. Because of its low cost and easy
availability after canals and railroads had penetrated northeastern
Pennsylvania in the 1830s and 1840s, older methods of refining wrought iron
were superseded by "puddling," which had been developed in Great
Britain by Henry Cort. Through use of this method, pig iron was decarbonized by
being heated in coal-fired reverberatory furnaces before passing through rolls,
emerging as wrought iron bars suitable for conversion into boiler plate,
sheets, and rails. Factories, now able to adopt all-metal machinery because
iron was less expensive, multiplied throughout the Northeast; steam engines
replaced waterwheels; and productivity increased rapidly in a wide range of
industries that were dependent upon heat. By the time of the Civil War,
anthracite was the nation's leading blast furnace fuel. 12
11. On the properties
of anthracite as a blast furnace fuel, see Frederick Overman, Treatise on Metallurgy (1852; 6th ed.,
New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1882), 389-93. On the transfer of hot-blast
technology from Great Britain to the United States see Darwin H. Stapleton, The Transfer of Early Industrial
Technologies to America (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society,
1987), 169-201.
12. Alfred D.
Chandler, "Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution
in the United States," BHR 46 (1972): 141-81. See also Chandler's Visible
Hand, 76-77. For further discussions of anthracite and its importance to the
iron industry, see W. David Lewis, "The Early History of the Lackawanna
Iron and Coal Company: A Study in Technological Adaptation," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 96 (1972): 424-68, and W. Ross Yates, "Discovery of the
Process for Making Anthracite Iron," ibid. 98 (1974): 206-23.
Excerpt
from P. 61 - 67
James W. Sloss and Birmingham
Birmingham's leaders
worked hard to make their dreams come true. With their encouragement, Daniel
Pratt performed the last of many services on behalf of Alabama's industrial
progress in 1872 by helping establish a new enterprise in the district, the
Eureka Mining and Transportation Company. Its aim was to rebuild the old
furnace at Oxmoor, as the site where Stroup had built the stack in 1863 was now
called. Since being destroyed by Wilson's raiders at the end of the war, it had
been only a heap of rubble. Raising the height of the original stack from
thirty-two to sixty feet and widening the bosh, the new Eureka ownership also
built a second furnace on the site, spending about $200,000. Early in 1873, the
furnaces went into blast. As workers waited for the first runs of iron, dogs
flushed a deer that ran headlong through the pig beds; wild turkeys swarmed
throughout the nearby woods, which teemed with game. Supplied by a narrow-gauge
railroad leading to ore mines a few miles away, the furnaces smelted red ore
with a mixture of charcoal and coke. Because of inexperience on the part of
both the management and the workers, however, output was meager.46
Despite the low
productivity of the furnaces, the Eureka Company's venture at Oxmoor made a
significant contribution to the development of Birmingham by bringing into the
area Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben, characterized by Ethel Armes as "the
most picturesque and dramatic character in the coal and iron history of the
South." Descended from a Hessian mercenary who had fought for Great Britain
in the American Revolution, DeBardeleben had been born in Autauga County in
1841. Like many other natives of the region who later became industrialists, he
came from an agricultural background; his father was a cotton planter who had
migrated to Alabama from South Carolina.
Orphaned at ten,
DeBardeleben became Daniel Pratt's legal ward. Working for the latter, he
advanced from head of the teamsters to boss of the lumber yard and
superintendent of the cotton gin factory. After serving in the Confederate army
and fighting in the Shiloh campaign, he went home to take charge of a bobbin
factory owned by Pratt and married his daughter, Ellen. As Wayne Flynt has
indicated, the union epitomized the alliance between planters and manufacturers
that would ultimately result in the founding of Birmingham. Though wild and
impulsive, DeBardeleben gained his father-inlaw's confidence. In 1872, Pratt
put him in charge at Oxmoor, where his inexperience—DeBardeleben freely
acknowledged at the time that he knew nothing about making iron—helped
bring about the project's failure. His spirit, however, aptly described by
Armes as "savagely energetic, restless, impatient," epitomized the
zest for exploiting the natural environment that was fundamental to
Birmingham's formative style.
DeBardeleben compared
himself with the "piney rooter," a skinny hog that was well known to
local residents and survived by using its snout to dig for food. Black-haired,
with an aquiline nose, bushy mustache, and piercing eyes, "quick as a bird's,"
he had a ruddy, hawk-like face matching his fierce determination and
hard-bitten attitude. "There's nothing like taking a wild piece of land,
all rock and woods, ground not fit to feed a goat on, and turning it into a
settlement of men and women, making pay rolls, bringing the railroads in, and
starting things going," he liked to say. "There's nothing like boring
a hillside through and turning over a mountain." Boiling with energy,
"he seemed to have one foot always in the stirrup and to be itching to
mount and ride away," an admirer recalled. "I had rather be out in
the woods on the back of a fox-trotting mule with a good seam of coal under my
feet than to be president of the United States," he once said. "I
never get lonely in the woods . . . and the rocks and the forests are the only
books I read."47
Birmingham needed
people of DeBardeleben's spirit. In 1873, it was devastated by a cholera
epidemic that decimated its population. While Mortimer H. Jordan, Mudd's
son-in-law, headed a cadre of physicians who worked around the clock to care
for the sick and dying, madams opened houses of ill fame to serve as makeshift
hospitals, and prostitutes volunteered to serve as nurses. The Panic of 1873
added to the misery, sending the price of iron plummeting and forcing businesses
to shut down. Settlers fled the area, and the value of stock in the Elyton Land
Company declined precipitously. Traffic on Alabama railroads that were now
operated by the L&N took a nosedive. At one point during the debacle, Fink
met Milner in Montgomery and turned on him bitterly. "You have ruined me,
you fool," he exclaimed. "Where are those coal mines and those iron
mines you talked so much about.... Where are they? I look, but I see nothing!
All lies!—lies!" Soon, Fink resigned from the L&N, feeling disgraced
by the failure of events in Alabama to turn out as he had hoped. Even Powell,
who had become the city's first elected mayor in 1873, lost faith. Resigning as
president of the Elyton Land Company in March 1875, he was succeeded by Henry
Caldwell. Returning to Mississippi, where he founded a town on the Yazoo River,
Powell resurfaced in Birmingham in 1878 to make an unsuccessful run for mayor.
His career ended in 1883 when he was shot to death in Mississippi by a former
employee whom he had recently discharged. Morris and other local leaders tried
to have him buried in Birmingham, but he was instead interred in his family's
cemetery plot at Montgomery.48
Despite their
discouragement, most of Birmingham's leaders did not give up. Stung by Fink's
remarks, Milner organized the Newcastle Coal and Iron Company, which soon
produced seventy tons of coal per day. The most important step taken to revive
local industry, however, was at Oxmoor, where the Eureka Company was
reorganized by a syndicate headed by Daniel S. Troy, a Montgomery lawyer and
friend of Francis Gilmer who had served the Confederacy with valor in the Civil
War. Securing a legislative grant of limited liability and virtual exemption
from taxes, the group hired Levin S. Goodrich, an experienced Tennessee
ironmaster, to head a fresh campaign at Oxmoor. Using charcoal, he put one of
the furnaces in blast, increasing its output and reducing fuel consumption.
Still unsatisfied, he sent specimens of pig iron to Pittsburgh for chemical
analysis. The results were encouraging, but Goodrich realized that the future
of the Alabama iron industry hinged upon switching from charcoal to coke.49 No
other solution was compatible with high-volume production.
Oxmoor's financial
backers were skeptical about abandoning charcoal. A few earlier experiments
using coke on a small scale had taken place, but it was not clear that coal
from the Warrior Field was suitable for coking. Making iron with coke might
also require skills that local workers did not possess. Having already failed
once, most of Birmingham's promoters were not inclined to throw good money
after bad. Switching to coke, however, was the only way out. Already deeply in
debt, and well aware of the added outlays that Goodrich's plan would require,
the Oxmoor syndicate offered to turn the furnace over to any entrepreneurs who
were willing to gamble on it. At this juncture, Milner called a meeting at the
offices of the Elyton Land Company and urged those who attended to form a new
enterprise. His leadership resulted in a venture known as the Cooperative
Experimental Coke and Iron Company. It was headed by a three-man board of
managers including James W. Sloss, who once again demonstrated his faith in the
district by risking his fortune in its development.
Under Goodrich's
direction, five coke ovens were built. Samples of coal submitted by local mines
were tested to determine which would be most suitable for smelting Red Mountain
ore, and a variety from the "Browne seam" was selected. Named after
pioneer coal operator William Phineas Browne, it had been discovered by a local
prospector, "Uncle Billy" Gould, who had emigrated from Scotland to
Pennsylvania before coming to Alabama. so The ovens, some of which were of a
new Belgian design, were highly innovative, being equipped with oscillating
bottoms for easier loading and lateral flues for the controlled removal of
gases that would otherwise have gone to waste. As Jack R. Bergstresser has
stated, this installation contradicts impressions that early industrial technology
in the Birmingham District was backward by comparison with that in other parts
of the country.51
Meanwhile, the newer
of the two furnaces at Oxmoor was remodeled for use of a hot-air blast.
Innovative equipment contrived by Goodrich included a cone-shaped charging
apparatus designed to retain furnace gases in the stack. Combustible gas
recovered from the coke ovens was used to heat the blast and fire the boilers
that provided steam to the blowing engine. With such apparatus, modern by all
prevailing standards, a crucial experiment took place to smelt iron with coke
at the revamped Oxmoor furnace. The event later became the subject of so much
folklore that it is hard to determine exactly what took place. A fictional
account published eighty years later spoke of a crowd whose members
"pressed as close as they dared while the fiery soup rushed down the main
sow out into the dozens of pig beds" and compared the scene to "the
Fourth of July in hell.... It had a brutal magnificence that gave it dignity
and an awful kind of beauty, dwarfing its human masters. Even the sky had a
hectic flush."52 Much of this description, however, is
sheer imagination. Even the date later reported by Ethel Armes and repeated in
numerous accounts including the novel just cited—28 February
1876—is wrong; the first blow actually occurred on 1 l March of that
year, yielding thirteen tons of "silver grey iron." A brief report
made to a local newspaper by the secretary of the Eureka Company three days
later indicated that output had been raised to about twenty-five tons, using
various mixtures of coke and red hematite. "This is an important epoch in
the industrial history of Alabama, upon which we congratulate her people as
well as the Eureka Company," the newspaper stated. "It is no longer a
question as to whether our coals will make good iron from our ores." The
coke had "proved sufficiently strong to sustain the burden required and
the product of the furnace is all that was hoped for."53
Almost three weeks
later, the news from Red Mountain was reported in New York City by a leading
trade journal, Iron Age, which indicated that output for the first full week of
operations at Oxmoor had been 175 tons. "This is large work for a 60 x 12
furnace, but whether it is good for the furnace is questionable," stated a
notice that gave the event scant attention. "The best practice is not to
push the furnace at first, but to let it come up to its work very
gradually."54 It was not the first time, or the last,
that eastern experts would take a condescending attitude toward the upstart
industry that was slowly beginning to appear in Alabama.
Despite the derision
with which the Oxmoor experiment was greeted on the eastern seaboard,
Birmingham had reached a critical turning point in its emergence as an
industrial center. That coke made from Warrior coal could be successfully used
to smelt pig iron became the salvation of the district. In modern terms,
however, what had happened at Oxmoor was merely a "pilot project." It
did not prove that pig iron could be made consistently on a large scale in the
Birmingham area and marketed profitably outside the region. It did, however,
encourage further investment.
The ensuing search for
outside capital led to new problems. Large sums of money, far more than existed
in Alabama itself, were needed to fulfill the prospects that the results of the
Oxmoor experiment had created. Pratt was now dead, and his heir, DeBardeleben,
held title to the Oxmoor property. His interests, plus those of local
businessmen who had backed the Cooperative Experimental Coke and Iron Company,
had to be combined with outside funds under a new financial arrangement.
Because of the role that the L&N had played in developing the area, its
stake in Birmingham's future, and its function as chief distributor of the
region's products to the outside world, investors in Louisville were primed to
help. Their bitter rival, Cincinnati, was also a natural market for Birmingham
pig iron because of its geographical location and its thriving foundries and rolling
mills. By this time, Ohio's Queen City had been connected to the L&N by
rail; despite their dislike of Cincinnati, financial leaders in Louisville had
approved the new line because it used a gauge different from that of the
L&N, thus enabling Louisville to profit from being the place where freight
between Cincinnati and the South had to be reloaded. Both cities therefore had
a strong community of interest with Birmingham.55
Soon
after the Oxmoor experiment, two of Birmingham's
most prominent business leaders volunteered to make
arrangements between local investors and their counterparts
in Louisville and Cincinnati. James
Thomas, a northern emigrant who belonged to the
Pennsylvania iron-making family that had introduced
hot-blast technology to the United States, served
as an intermediary with Cincinnati entrepreneurs.
Meanwhile, Sloss once again helped preserve Birmingham's
momentum by agreeing to represent the community
in meetings with financiers from Louisville. After
negotiations had been completed, the L&N over
a two-year period subscribed $60,000 in the stock
of the Oxmoor venture, built a spur line to serve
Birmingham coal and iron companies, and made other
commitments that brought its total stake in the
district to a reported $l2;000.56 Cincinnati businessmen
also risked heavily in the area. As the two cities
vied to gain the upper hand, local leaders, particularly
DeBardeleben, played one off against the other in
an attempt to protect local interests.
With the infusion of
fresh capital, both of the Oxmoor furnaces were rebuilt for expanded
production, using coke. Although their sixty-foot height made their relatively
small by northern standards, the new stacks had iron shells, which were
atypical of Alabama furnaces at this time and reflected continued adoption of
up-to-date equipment. Batteries of coke ovens, some of which were equipped with
reversible bottoms recently developed in Belgium, were built at Helena and
Oxmoor. Despite such progress, the chemical peculiarities of Red Mountain ore
and the inexperience of the crews at Oxmoor resulted in output well below
northern standards. Goodrich soon returned to Tennessee to rebuild an ironworks
in Nashville, and quarrels between rival Cincinnati and Louisville backers
continued to plague the Oxmoor enterprise.57
With Powell gone,
Milner assumed his mantle as the district's chief promoter. In 1876, he
published a book, Alabama As It Was, As It Is, and As It Will Be, to expound
its advantages. He took a broad view, beginning with an analysis of the depths
into which agriculture had fallen in the state since the Civil War. This
decline he blamed upon two things: the overweening concentration on cotton
cultivation to the detriment of foodstuffs, requiring imports from other
states, and the emancipation of blacks, who, he asserted, were inherently
incapable of becoming productive as free citizens. The remedy, he said, was to
encourage white Anglo-Saxon immigrants from Europe to learn American methods of
farming and fill the inexhaustibly fertile agricultural lands along the
corridor that the South and North Railroad was now operating as a subsidiary of
the L&N. As an illustration of what could be done, he pointed to the
accomplishments of German immigrants now settling in Cullman County.
Buttressing his argument was a dismal estimate of agricultural prospects in the
western states, based partly on his experiences during the Gold Rush.
Capitalizing on the still-prevalent belief that a "Great American
Desert" lay west of the one-hundredth parallel, he painted a harsh picture
of arid lands, scorching winds, and other adverse climatic conditions, all
aimed at convincing readers that settling in Alabama's potential agricultural
paradise was preferable to life even in such supposedly favored places as
California. Quoting from eyewitness accounts, he claimed that irrigation was no
remedy for such desperate circumstances; even including hay and wild grass, he
declared, the whole state of Nevada could produce only one-fifth the crop yield
of Montgomery County in 1860.
Milner closed his book
with a glowing vision of the prospects of Alabama's Mineral District, pointing
out its advantages over the Chattanooga region. No place on earth, he claimed,
could compete with Alabama pig iron, given the proximity and quality of Jones
Valley's raw materials and the low cost of black labor. As Alabama attracted
more and more Caucasian immigrants, he asserted, its black population would
decline and wither away. Meanwhile, blacks, who were better suited for
industrial tasks under white supervision than for tilling fields, could make a
useful contribution by mining coal and tending blast furnaces. 58
The district's switch
to coke set off a wave of speculation in the Warrior coal field. Among the many
new arrivals swarming into the area was Truman H. Aldrich, an engineer from New
York who had moved to Alabama after graduating from Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute in 1869. After starting a bank in Selma, he had acquired and
modernized coal mines at Montevallo before coming to Jefferson County in 1877.
Prospecting in the Warrior field, he discovered the rich Jefferson and Black
Creek seams. Sloss, admiring his engineering expertise, went into partnership
with him. Soon, DeBardeleben also joined. In January 1878, after acquiring
30,000 acres in the Warrior field, Aldrich, DeBardeleben, and Sloss formed the
Pratt Coal and Coke Company, named in memory of Daniel Pratt. With help from
Joseph Squire, a British engineer who advised DeBardeleben on the location of
coal deposits it soon became the largest mining enterprise in the district. The
Browne seam was now renamed the Pratt seam, also in honor of DeBardeleben's
deceased father-in-law. Not long after its establishment, the Pratt enterprise
built a spur line into Birmingham and began shipping coal and coke in February
1879. The opening of this artery played a vital role in re-animating the
community, whose population had shrunk to only 1,200 people. 59
Without pausing,
DeBardeleben joined other investors in creating Alice Furnace, named for his oldest
daughter. Building was begun in September 1879 on a twenty-acre tract at the
western edge of the railroad reservation donated by the Elyton Land Company,
and the stack went into operation on z3 November 1880. The largest blast
furnace erected in Alabama to that date, it was also the first to be designed
from the start to use coke. It had the distinction of making the first
coke-fired pig iron from the area to win favor in the North and sell there at
competitive prices.60 Sixty-three feet high and fifteen feet
wide at the bosh, it achieved an average daily production of fiftythree tons of
pig iron under the supervision of Thomas T. Hillman, a veteran ironmaster whose
grandfather had built the Roupes Valley forge in 1830. Known as "Little
Alice" or "Alice No. 1'' to distinguish it from a second and larger
installation, "Big Alice," built in 1883, it set off a mania of
furnace construction that Robert H. McKenzie later called "The Great
Birmingham Iron Boom."61
46. Woodward, Alabama Blast Furnaces, 107-8;
"Stirring Sketch of Col. H. F: DeBardeleben's Life Shows
Picturesqueness," BA-H, 7 December 1910.
47. Armes, Coal and
Iron, 238-42, 343; DAB s.v. "Henry Fairchild DeBardeleben"; Justin
Fuller, "Henry E DeBardeleben, Industrialist of the New South," AR 39
(January 1986), 318; "Col. H. E DeBardeleben's Life Ends After Many Years
of Stirring Events" and "Stirring Sketch," BA-H, 7 December
1910. As indicated, I am indebted to Prof. Wayne Flynt of the History
Department at Auburn University, for suggesting the symbolism inherent in the
marriage between Henry E DeBardeleben and Ellen Pratt.
48. McMillan, Yesterday's Birmingham, 19-20; Klein,
Louisville & Nashville, 130; Caldwell, Elyton Land Company, 13; Memorial
Record of Alabama, 2: 250-5l; Crane, Life
of Powell, 246-307. On Jordan's work and background, see Bonner,
"Arlington," 225.
49. On these
developments and the events that followed, see Armes, Coal and Iron 255-61,
and Klein, Louisville & Nashville,
133-34. On Troy, see DuBose, Jefferson
County and Birmingham, 179-82.
50. DuBose, Jefferson County and Birmingham, 556-
58.
51. Bergstresser. Sr.
. "Raw Material Constraints, " 104- s, 161 -63. 52. 53
52. Ethel Miller
Gorman, Red Acres (Birmingham: Vulcan
Press, 1956), 302.
53. Compare Armes,
Coal and Iron, 261, and Birmingham Weekly Iron Age, 16 March 1876. The account in BWIA indicates that James
Thomas, not Goodrich, superintended the Oxmoor experiment. Armes placed
Thomas at the Irondale furnace at this time.
54. IA, 30 March 1876.
55. On the fund-raising
activities discussed here and in the following paragraph, see Armes, Coal and Iron, 261 -62, and Klein, Louisville & Nashville, 134- 35.
56. Keith, "Role
of the Louisville and Nashville," 169.
57. In addition to the
discussion in Armes, Coal and Iron,
262-63, see also Woodward, Alabama Blast
Fumaces, 108.
58. Milner, Alabama As It Was, passim.
59. Armes, Coal and Iron, 266-82; Fuller,
"Henry E DeBardeleben," 5-6; Owen, History of Alabama, 3:16.
60. Armes, Coal and Iron, 283-87, Woodward, Alabama Blast Fumaces, 37-38.
61. Robert H.
McKenzie, "The Great Birmingham Iron Boom, 1880-1892," A Journal of
History [West Jefferson County Historical Society, Bessemer, Ala.] 3 (April
1975): 201-l l; Woodward, Alabama Blast
Fumaces, 160-62.
Excerpt from
P. 142
Takeover,
Expansion, and Recession
Yet
one more large industrial venture and a related
boom town got underway in Jones Valley late in 1886.
Eighteen years earlier, one of America's leading
industrialists, David Thomas, had been introduced
to north Alabama by Giles Edwards, a Welsh ironworker
who had moved south from Pennsylvania just before
the Civil War and built an ironworks at Woodstock
in Tuscaloosa County. Thomas, who had come to the
United States from Wales in 1839, had taken the
lead in transferring hot-blast technology from Great
Britain to America and was renowned as the "father
of the anthracite iron industry." As a result
of his influence, many furnaces had been built in
eastern Pennsylvania to utilize anthracite. By the
late nineteenth century, the Thomas Iron Company,
headquartered at Hokendauqua, Pennsylvania, was
the world's largest maker of anthracite iron. 23
After
visiting Alabama, Thomas acquired several ore and
coal tracts. In addition to the historic Tannehill
property in Roupes Valley, these included Jefferson
County deposits. In December 1868, a syndicate headed
by Thomas incorporated the Pioneer Mining and Manufacturing
Company to develop these holdings. Like the Woodwards,
however, the Thomas family did not immediately move
into Alabama, even after they bought Williamson
Hawkins's 1,774-acre Jones Valley plantation in
1881. Instead, the Pioneer firm remained dormant
until 1886, by which time the increasingly successful
invasion of the northeast by southern pig iron had
shown that the obsolescent anthracite iron industry
was doomed. David Thomas was by then dead, and the
Thomas Iron Company was headed by his son, Samuel.
Resigning as its president in 1887, the latter moved
to the Birmingham District. This move delighted
local boosters who savored the event as an important
victory in the Magic City's relentless war against
northern companies.
The Pioneer Company erected a large, up-to-date
blast furnace and established a community named Thomas after the family that
owned the enterprise. The town, built on a site four miles southwest of
Birmingham, was modeled on Hokendauqua; houses with features resembling those
of workers' dwellings in eastern Pennsylvania were erected, adding a new
element to the increasing architectural diversity of Jones Valley. By the time
the first furnace went into blast in May 1888, it was reported that Thomas had
decided to build two more, at a cost of $300,000. Only one of these, a
duplicate of the first, was actually constructed, beginning production in
February 1880. The other did not materialize until 1902, when new owners built
a ninety-foot stack, the largest ever erected in the district up to that time. 24
23. Armes, -Coal and Iron, 173-77, 212. For an
extended discussion of David Thomas and his work, see Stapleton, Transfer of Early Industrial Technologies,
169-201.
24. White, Birmingham District, 131-33; Robert
Casey and Marjorie Longenecker White , "A Look at Thomas, An Alabama Iron
Town," Canal History and Technology Proceedings 9 (17 March 199o): 121-41;
"Two More Furnaces for Alabama," MR, 2 5 February 1888; Woodward,
Alabama Blast Furnaces, 142.
Excerpt
from P. 354
McQueen
in Command
Born in 1866, James William McQueen came to
Alabama with his mother and two brothers the following year, after his father
died. Their family home in South Carolina had been destroyed by Sherman~
forces, and the children were reared in genteel poverty. Forced to fend for
himself early in life, McQueen took a job at age fifteen as a telegraph
operator for the Alabama Great Southern Railroad at Eutaw, southwest of
Tuscaloosa on the way to Meridian, Mississippi. In 1886, he became a joint
agent for that line and the Cahaba Coal Company, working in such places as
Woodstock, a village between Tuscaloosa and Birmingham.. There his lifelong
association with the iron industry began when he met his future wife; Lydia.
Her father, Giles Edwards, was a blast furnace superintendent who had migrated
to Pennsylvania from Wales in the 184os, moved to Chattanooga in 1859, and come
to Alabama three years later to rebuild the Shelby Iron Works at Columbiana.
McQueen, a ruddy-faced, robust young man known to his friends as Will, married
Lydia in 1889. A year later, he and his bride moved to Birmingham when the
Alabama Great Southern sent him there as a train dispatcher. Soon, Seddon
attracted him to Sloss by offering him higher pay.